Well, that's what they did with the moon... You have to start somewhere.

Landing anything big enough to survive in on Mars is so far an unsolved problem, and it would be much more costly since you need a lander, return stage, and the fuel to power it all. If money and time are limited, you have to cut features, and landing is one. Can't have it all, but if he can manage to have something, well, I'll cheer him on.

On the other hand, there are currently a lot of big plans out there and very little action. So let's see if anything will actually happen first.

_________________Say, can you feel the thunder in the air? Just like the moment ’fore it hits – then it’s everywhereWhat is this spell we’re under, do you care? The might to rise above it is now within your sphereMachinae Supremacy – Sid Icarus

How about sending many many automated or tele presence printing resources, on planet, get a habitat built before any one even lands...

progress is progress, no boots on sand, if those boots are on a corpse...

I think that it would probably be better to drop any manufacturing kit on Phobos or Deimos. Phobos IIRC is meant to be quite a mixture probably lots of carbon and ice along with other useful stuff. And use that as a staging post.

Now here is a crazy idea how about landing on Phobos making lots of long carbon nano tubes from the local carbon weaving it together calculating very accurately then bungee jumping down to Mars letting go at lowest point and if you want to come back use the same system as a skyhook?

At least until turning Deimos into the counterweight for a Mars space elevator as i think its in a better orbit for that kind of thing.

_________________Someone has to tilt at windmills.So that we know what to do when the real giants come!!!!

I think many small "resource bases" are needed together to space, as there is no nice place to hang out that has all the elements and conditions needed,

but you are right, lower Grav + more resources = Robot printing base, and then you can just shoot the robots to mars, from the moons, and they can do there tasks, and then be disassembled on planet side, and used to build habitat after the achieve there design goals.

so you pepper mars with robots, that build more robots, that build a habitat,

_________________Let not the bindings of society hold you back from improving it.... the masses follow where the bold explore.

Yeah 5 years no way. I don't care that it's Dennis Tito. Decent idea otherwise, but yeah. Assume they use Bigelow components, assume they use the ISS recycling system, assume they use Falcon Heavy. All those things are ready yes, but building a manned Earth Departure Stage system in 5 years I don't care how risk taking you are or how agile your engineering team is, there's just no way. This is a major aerospace project. How long did SS1 take? Like 6 years? And that was WAY less even considering how rudimentary what they are proposing is. Sure they want to throw more money on it... but... unless this has been skunk worksed for the past 2-3 years it's not possible.

A fully fueled Centaur takes up about half the mass-to-LEO of a Falcon Heavy. Attach it to a Bigelow BA 330 and you have the departure stage and crew module, still within the mass budget of the Heavy. Then you'd launch the crew on a Falcon 9 with crewed Dragon and the extended trunk full of supplies (and replace 5 of the 7 crew with supplies as well). Or maybe that would need to be a Falcon Heavy as well to get enough supplies up there, or two F9s if the Heavy isn't human-rated.

A lot of things would have to go just right, but I think it's not completely impossible to do it by 2018...

_________________Say, can you feel the thunder in the air? Just like the moment ’fore it hits – then it’s everywhereWhat is this spell we’re under, do you care? The might to rise above it is now within your sphereMachinae Supremacy – Sid Icarus

Ah, looks like they're planning a single Falcon Heavy with a Dragon on top and two crew, using the Falcon second stage for the injection into the free return orbit to Mars, and aerobraking the Dragon on return. Here's a PDF with a fairly extensive description.

Reading it I have to say that this seems like one of those NASA mission proposals that are littering their archives by the hundreds, except that this time there's someone making a lot of noise in the media about it. Then again, Dennis Tito is apparently a funds manager these days, so he must know some people with deep pockets. And anyway the technologies developed for this will be useful. On the other hand, I don't see why this project should succeed where all those others never got off the drawing board...

_________________Say, can you feel the thunder in the air? Just like the moment ’fore it hits – then it’s everywhereWhat is this spell we’re under, do you care? The might to rise above it is now within your sphereMachinae Supremacy – Sid Icarus

Is there any way they can launch multiple back to back missions like this? leave people, on each mission, re-supply on the next, and pick up people?

this is the only way something like this will add up to people living on mars.again, just putting boots on the ground is a huge waste of resources,

We need a concerted international persistent presence on mars, in order to A. "back up" earths bio diversity , think project Svalbard but on mars,

B. A dream like this is needed to prove that we are not just messing around in space, and start "reaping the benefit" of such a endeavor, A SPACE PORT WITH A MUCH LOWER ESCAPE VELOCITY and a "Lagrange point" opening up further exploration/resource acquisition...

C. To establish a permanent robotic repair station to fix the autonomous mining/exploration systems that need to be launched there in preparation for a "Robot factory" to further develop the area/resources

_________________Let not the bindings of society hold you back from improving it.... the masses follow where the bold explore.